Doug Bailey, a Republican political consultant who helped U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander come up with the idea of walking across Tennessee during Alexander’s first successful run for governor in 1978, died last week in Virginia. He was 79.

In his new book Coup, which covers in detail how Alexander took office three days early in the midst of a pardons scandal engulfing outgoing Gov. Ray Blanton, author Keel Hunt writes that he and other political advisers, including Bailey, talked about how to reinvigorate Alexander’s image in 1977, more than a year before the election.

Alexander had lost a gubernatorial bid to Blanton in 1974. So he, wife Honey and the rest of his brain trust “began to discuss a new concept that would help the candidate shake off any vestige of his unhelpful 1974 image – that of a lawyer in a dark suit and necktie, who was mainly seen at airport news conferences.”

After Honey Alexander urged her husband to “do the things you like to do,” Alexander said he liked being outdoors and meeting people.

“Then he could walk,” Bailey said.

“So the idea was hatched: A walk across Tennessee,” Hunt writes. “A thousand miles. Six months. Shaking a thousand hands a day. Spending the nights in homes with Tennessee families along the way.”

In a speech on the Senate floor Monday, Alexander said Bailey “put all that on television, and I won the election.”

“Now, to some, that would seem like an ultimate political gimmick, but if you think about it, the idea of the walk across Tennessee was a good deal more authentic than the photo-ops and the press releases and the five-second sound bites that are often what we end up with in politics today,” he said. “But let me just say it this way: I would have never been elected governor if it hadn’t been for Doug Bailey.”

Bailey, who also worked with former U.S. Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee and other Republicans around the country, went on to start The Hotline, which The New York Times called “a digest of political news, distributed by fax, that became an indispensable tool of the political trade in the pre-Web 1980s and ’90s.”